Who She Is
Lisa, whose diminutive is Lizanka, is the eldest daughter of Ivan Ilyich Golovin and Praskovya Fyodorovna Golovina. In chapter II, seventeen years after her parents' marriage, she is sixteen, studies at home and grows up well. In the new house of chapter III she is courted by the young men of the best society, and one of them, Petrishchev, an examining magistrate and sole heir to a fortune, ends up proposing to her in chapter XI. She goes through her father's illness at the height of her youth and her outings, and the book always shows her from outside his room.
Trajectory
In chapter I, in the dining room of the dead man's house, Pyotr Ivanovich finds her all in black, her slim waist looking even slimmer, with a somber, resolute, almost angry air; she greets him as if he were guilty of something, and her fiancé, behind her, has the same offended air.
In chapter III, her father prepares a room for her in the new house, the family keeps the poor relatives away, and only the best society visits the house. Petrishchev courts her so eagerly that her father already speaks to her mother of troika rides or a show that would bring them together.
In chapter IV, when her father begins to fall ill, one of his complaints at the table is his daughter's hairstyle. When he comes back from the famous doctor and tells his wife about the consultation, Lisa comes in wearing a hat to go out with her mother, sits down with an effort to listen to that tedium and cannot bear it for long. Mother and daughter, at the height of the season of outings, do not understand, or do not want to understand, what is happening to him, and they grow annoyed as if he were to blame. In chapter VI, on finding a scratch on the table in the drawing room, the father is irritated by the carelessness of his daughter and her friends with the album (The Decorated Room).
In chapter VIII she enters her father's room dressed for the theater, her young body on display, strong, healthy, in love and indignant at the illness, the suffering and the death that disturb her happiness. She argues with her mother over an opera glass. When the talk about Sarah Bernhardt stops and everyone falls silent as they look at the father, it is she who breaks the silence:
всем становилось страшно, что вдруг нарушится как-нибудь приличная ложь, и ясно будет всем то, что есть, everyone was afraid that the decorous lie might suddenly break somehow, and everyone would see clearly what it was.
She says that if they are going, it is time, glancing at the clock, a gift from her father, and she smiles at her fiancé with a smile only the two of them understand.
In chapter XI, after Petrishchev's formal proposal, she comes to greet her father, and he tells her curtly that he will soon free them from himself. Outside, she asks her mother what they are to blame for, as if they had done it: she pities her father, but why torment them?
Themes Embodied
Lisa embodies the youth for whom her father's Death is an inconvenience, and the book draws her through the word guilt at both ends. In chapter I she greets Pyotr Ivanovich as if he were guilty of something; in chapter IV the household treats her father as responsible for his illness; in chapter XI she asks what they are to blame for. The question of who is guilty is the form that Truth and Lies takes in her: the approaching death must be someone's fault, and so it need not be looked at.
What she wants is stated in chapter VIII: the happiness that the engagement promises. What she fears is that the illness will spoil it. What she knows, she knows as everyone does: that her father is dying, and that is why she must break the silence before the theater. Where she is wrong is in thinking the silence can be broken without saying anything, and the text shows that she breaks it by saying precisely what everyone wanted to hide, the hurry to leave.
Divergent Readings
The text sustains two readings of her. In one, she is the daughter who repeats her parents, raised on the agreeable and the decorous, for whom her father's agony is a social inconvenience, and the clock, his gift, serves to mark the hour to leave. In the other, she is a young woman who was sixteen when the family moved, to whom no one in the house taught any language for death other than the decorous lie, and who in chapter XI says, though from outside the room, that she pities her father. The first reading weighs on chapter VIII; the second, on chapter XI, and the book does not reconcile them.
Relationships
- Ivan Ilyich Golovin: the father, who favors her courtship (chapter III) and tells her at the end that he will soon free them from himself (chapter XI).
- Praskovya Fyodorovna Golovina: the mother, with whom she goes out during the season (chapter IV) and to the theater (chapter VIII), and to whom she asks what they are to blame for (chapter XI).
- Pyotr Ivanovich: who meets her at the wake (chapter I).
- Vasya: the brother, who enters the father's room after her, unnoticed (chapter VIII).